The ‘anchorless campaign’ of Zee Hindustan struck gold at the first edition of Afaqs Media Innovation Awards held at fun-filled evening on March 27, in Gurugram. At the heart of this campaign was the determination to deal with change and an ability to innovate with an unusual, yet useful idea.
ZEE Media wanted to spread awareness about the ZEE Hindustan channel re-launch and its one-of-a-kind content format. The Group wanted to position the channel as an independent entity and make sure that the communication was clutter breaking to get this move noticed by the entire nation.
Hero worship in India is too big. The devotion of people of India for film fraternity and cricketers is probably unparalleled. Not all forms of hero worship are healthy, however. And let’s not even talk about religion because “Hell hath no fury like Indians scorned on religious matters’. Even when it comes to news channels, we are biased with our favourite anchors. They colour our opinion, most of the stories come through the lens of star anchors that appears on news channels, and their fan base is humongous. Hence, the biggest challenge for us was how to launch a news channel without a face amidst the likes of Arnab, Ravish, Rajat, and Sudhir. And that too in as little money as possible. Though we didn’t have any news anchors, our competitors had myriads of them so we thought of creating a stir in this chaos with a disruptive idea. After all, ‘you have got to be in it, to win it’. Therefore, we treated the ‘Launch of Zee Hindustan’ like a News Story. Knowing if we targeted high profile anchors in our mainline campaign with enough noise in the first week, our competing channels would be left with no option but to respond. This would magnify and make our message viral, giving us mileage far beyond our media spends. With a series of Print Ads, Hoardings and TVCs across the Zee Network channels, we targeted videos, websites, and searches on each one of the top anchors across the internet. And we can see that it worked like fire!
The main message of this provocative campaign ‘Ab anchor nahi, khabrein khud bolengi, kyun ki aap samajhdaar hai’ was followed with the messages like – “since the news were speaking for itself what would the leading anchors of other channels like Arnab, Ravish, Rajat would do? “ Well, they got busy! Ravish Instagrammed, Anjana tweeted, Rajat Sharma filed a Case in Delhi High Court, and Arnab Goswami went ahead and launched a new Hindi news channel. The messaging triggered high buzz and created a stir in the media industry making Zee Hindustan India’s 1st anchorless channel. Zee Hindustan became India’s 1st channel to go anchorless. Thanks to our strategy we used top anchors of other channels to promote ZEE HINDUSTAN on their personal & official channels.
Even with Zero Digital Spends Zee Hindustan became the talk of the town quite literally. In a forced opinionated environment, Zee Hindustan broke the clutter and create a niche for itself amongst viewers. And without even knowing the star anchors of the competitors’ news channels made the launch of ZEE Hindustan a howling success.
